like a German house?" he queried.

You may hardly credit it, but my interview with Dicky Allerton that
afternoon had simply driven the war out of my mind. When one has lived
much among foreign peoples, one's mentality slips automatically into
their skin. I was now thinking in German--at least so it seems to me
when I look back upon that night--and I answered without reflecting.

"I don't care where it is as long as I can get somewhere to sleep out of
this infernal rain!"

"The gentleman can have a good, clean bed at the Hotel Sixt in the
little street they call the Vos in't Tuintje, on the canal behind the
Bourse. The proprietress is a good German, jawohl ... Frau Anna Schratt
her name is. The gentleman need only say he comes from Franz at the
Bopparder Hof."

I gave the man a gulden and bade him get me a cab.

It was still pouring. As we rattled away over the glistening
cobble-stones, my mind travelled back over the startling events of the
day. My talk with old Dicky had given me such a mental jar that I found
it at first wellnigh impossible to concentrate my thoughts. That's the
worst of shell-shock. You think you are cured, you feel fit and well,
and then suddenly the machinery of your mind checks and halts and
creaks. Ever since I had left hospital convalescent after being wounded
on the Somme ("gunshot wound in head and cerebral concussion" the
doctors called it), I had trained myself, whenever my brain was _en
panne_, to go back to the beginning of things and work slowly up to the
present by methodical stages.

Let's see then--I was "boarded" at Millbank and got three months' leave;
then I did a month in the Little Johns' bungalow in Cornwall. There I
got the letter from Dicky Allerton, who, before the war, had been in
partnership with my brother Francis in the motor business at Coventry.
Dicky had been with the Naval Division at Antwerp and was interned with
the rest of the crowd when they crossed the Dutch frontier in those
disastrous days of October, 1914.

Dicky wrote from Groningen, just a line. Now that I was on leave, if I
were fit to travel, would I come to Groningen and see him? "I have had a
curious communication which seems to have to do with poor Francis," he
added. That was all.

My brain was still halting, so I turned to Francis. Here again I had to
go back. Francis, rejected on all sides for active service, owing to
what he scornfully used to call "the shirkers' ailment, varicose veins,"
h